The Case of the Secret Weapon - John R. Erickson Hank the Cowdog

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the darkness. “Oh, hi. What are you doing here?”

      I melted with relief. I mean, you’ve seen what happens to ice cream on a blistering hot day, right? That was me. All the muscles in my highly conditioned body released their tension, and I became a puddle of a doglike substance.

      Can you guess who it was? Drover. I didn’t know whether to be sad, mad, or glad. After a moment of brittle silence, I whispered, “What are you doing here, you little sneak?”

      “Well . . . I couldn’t sleep on that hard floor.”

      “What? That’s ridiculous! Drover, we are the elite troops of the ranch’s Security Division, and we sleep wherever we fall at the end of the day.”

      “Yeah, but I didn’t figure Slim would mind if I borrowed part of his bed. It’s a pretty nice bed.”

      “Of course it’s a nice bed, but it’s not for dogs.”

      “I’ll be derned. What are you doing here?”

      There was a moment of silence. “I was conducting a routine patrol of the promises.”

      “You mean the premises?”

      “What?”

      “You said you promised to parole the premises.”

      “That’s correct, and in the process of doing that, I caught you trespassing on Slim’s bed. Drover, I ought to throw the book at you! Do you have any idea what would happen if Slim woke up and caught us here?”

      “Reckon he’d be mad?”

      “Course he would. At the very least, he’d kick us out of bed. At the worst, he might throw us out of the house. Is that what you want, to become a homeless waif?”

      “Well, I sure like cookies.”

      “What?”

      “I like cookies.”

      “Yes, and so what? Everyone likes cookies.”

      “Well, you said something about vanilla wafers.”

      I took a slow breath of air and searched for patience. “Drover, I said ‘homeless waif,’ not vanilla wafer. A waif is not a cookie.”

      “Yeah, I think about ’em all the time. I even dream about cookies.”

      I stuck my nose in his face. “Stop talking about cookies. The point is that you’re taking up my space on Slim’s bed.”

      “Gosh, you mean . . .”

      “Yes. The Head of Ranch Security needs a good night’s sleep.”

      “Well, there’s plenty of room. Maybe we could share. I promise to be good.”

      I gave that some thought. “I suppose it might work. We’ll curl up at the foot of the bed.”

      I heard him giggle. “Foot of the bed. That’s a funny way to put it.”

      “What’s funny?”

      “Well, how can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg?”

      “Drover, if a bed has a foot, it must have a leg.”

      “Where is it?”

      “I don’t know. I don’t care. What’s your point?”

      “Well, a table has four legs but no feet. A bed has one foot and no legs. Somehow that doesn’t make sense.”

      “Look, pal, you can either make sense or sleep on the bed. Which will it be?”

      “Well . . . sleep, I guess, but I still say . . .”

      “Hush. Shut your little trap and go to sleep.”

      Whew. At last he shut his trap. I curled up at the foot of the bed and went . . . you know what? I couldn’t sleep—because I couldn’t stop thinking about Drover’s ridiculous question: How can a bed have a foot if it doesn’t have a leg to stand on?

      You see what he does to me? In my deepest heart, I DIDN’T CARE, but I couldn’t slink a wick all nerp and . . . swamping honk the snickle­fritzzzzzzzzz . . .

      Chapter Two: Morning at Slim’s Shack

      Okay, maybe I finally dozed off and managed to bag a few hours’ sleep on Slim’s bed. It was exactly the kind of peaceful sleep every loyal dog dreams about and deserves. But let the record show that I don’t care why a bed has a foot but no legs.

      I awoke sometime after dawn, lifted my head, and glanced around. Fresh morning light poured through the open window, and I heard the gobble of wild turkeys outside, a sure sign of a new day. Turkeys gobble and twitter in the morning when they leave their roost, don’t you see, and then they go trudging off to work, pecking seeds and chasing grasshoppers.

      I opened my jaws, threw a curl into my tongue, and was about to pull in a big yawn of fresh air when I noticed the head and face of a man, right beside me. I looked closer and was able to put a name with the face.

      It was Slim Chance, a friend of mine. In fact, he was the guy who owned the bed.

      I wasn’t surprised to find him in his own bed, but you might have already picked up an interesting clue. I had gone to sleep at his feet but had awakened beside his face. In other words, sometime in the night, the bed had reversed itself, and that was pretty amazing.

      You’d think that I would have noticed. I mean, Slim was a pretty big man and . . .

      Wait. There was another explanation. Sleeping beside the master’s face is the kind of thing a loyal dog sometimes does without thinking about it or even knowing about it. I mean, we care so deeply about our people that we just want to be close to them, and the deeper we care, the closer we want to be.

      And soft pillows are kind of nice, too. Hee hee.

      The problem is that . . . well, our people don’t always appreciate having a sleeping dog in their faces. I had a feeling that Slim wouldn’t be thrilled to find me sharing his pillow, and we sure didn’t need to start a new day with him half-asleep and mad.

      In other words, I needed to make a graceful exit before he woke up and caught me sleeping on his pillow.

      I began creeping backward, away from the pillow, past his rib cage and bony knees, and down to the region where his feet lived. There, I tapped a paw on the sleeping Drover and whispered, “Return to base!”

      He glanced around, blinked his eyes, and nodded, and together we slithered off the foot of the bed and tiptoed down the long hallway. When Slim emerged from his bedroom two hours later (it was a holiday, so he slept late), the entire Security Division was curled up asleep on the threadbare carpet.

      Heh heh. Old Slim never suspected a thing, although he did mutter something about “sleeping crooked” and having a crick in his neck.

      It’s always interesting to watch Slim first thing in the morning. I mean, he moves like someone who is half-blind, half-dead, and walking underwater. Here he came, creeping down the hall in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt, dragging his feet across the floor while his left hand felt its way along the wall. His eyes were red-rimmed and half-shut, his hair was down in his eyes, and he had pillow tracks on one side of his face.

      He finally made it to the living room, but he didn’t speak to us. At this time of day, he rarely speaks. If he tries to establish any kind of communication, it takes the form of grunting sounds, but on this particular morning, he didn’t even bother to grunt a greeting.

      Sliding his bare feet across the floor and holding one hand out in front of him, he made his way into the kitchen and headed straight for the device that would bring him out of the vapors—a pan of water that sat on one of the

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